www.Sarsen.org: October 2025

Friday, 3 October 2025

Salisbury Plain Shearing Shed Award

As the new Stonehenge Visitor Centre has passed its first decade in service I am reminded of the architectural award it won. The praise for it included: "in its basic partie it is a decoy, but also a sheep-pen and wool shed to shear the visitor flock of their spare change while dispensing a basic understanding of where and why they are there". https://wp.architecture.com.au/international/winner-public-architecture-stonehenge-exhibition-visitor-centre-by-dcm/

Jorn Utzon Award at the National Architecture Awards in Darwin
National Architecture Awards Jury citation

More than one million people visit Stonehenge every year, placing immense stress on one of the world’s most important archaeological sites. The site’s public facilities had grown in an ad hoc way over many decades and there had been several failed attempts to resolve the unsatisfactory arrangement. This important project finally finds a resolution for the site. Designing the Exhibition and Visitor Centre for this ancient UNESCO World Heritage site is a significant responsibility and Denton Corker Marshall has achieved it with grace and gentleness, ensuring most importantly that the facility does not dominate the site. The centre is placed 2.5 kilometres west of the stones, connected to the monument by a shuttle path but remaining out of sight from it.

The architectural composition is centred on a pair of single-storey pods, one timber and the other glass. These pods shelter beneath a sweeping canopy roof supported by slender angled stick columns, its edges perforated to cast dappled light on the forms beneath. The metal roof undulates to reflect the rolling landscape of Salisbury Plain, while the thin columns resonate with the nearby forest. The glass pod houses the cafe, shop and education space, and the solid timber pod contains the exhibition, information space and toilets. Service areas and staff facilities are placed in a low ancillary building behind trees that hide the coach parking.

The project harnesses a suite of measures to minimize its environmental footprint. These include extensive natural ventilation, natural light, open-loop ground source heat pumps, passive shading, bore water supply and on-site sewerage treatment. Most importantly, the centre is designed to be reversible, meaning that it can be removed in the future with minimal impact on the landscape.

This is a masterful work of architecture, both timeless and poetic. It sits with authority in the historic landscape, with facilities that help develop a better understanding of Stonehenge and its place in world history.

International Architecture Awards 2014 – Award for Public Architecture

Just as this project was being selected for an International Award, an exhibition opened at London’s RIBA with the neo-colonialist, chest-beating title ‘The Brits who built the Modern World’. The provocative subtlety of the Stonehenge Visitors Centre suggests a countering appendix title to the macho posturing in Upper Regent Street – something in the order of: ‘…and the Australians who taught them how to deal with the World of Pre-history’.

That the modern world is not all high-tech bling is well demonstrated by the busloads of fast-food splattered gawkers who descend on Stonehenge; 1 million per year. The Visitor Centre feels Australian; in its basic partie it is a decoy, but also a sheep-pen and wool shed to shear the visitor flock of their spare change while dispensing a basic understanding of where and why they are there (Interpretive Exhibition).

In the DCM building, a deft transition takes place: a transition from crowd management to spatial and tectonic poetry. The multiple poles that hold the wafer thin roof aloft remind one of the Aboriginal activist delegation that landed on the shores of England in the 1970’s, planted a stick in the ground, and with brilliant polemic ‘claimed the Island in the name of the Aboriginal people of Australia’.

The two pavilions, one timber clad and the other glass, put the visitor conceptually and physically into the mysterious landscape of the Salisbury Plain. This is a building that does justice to a UNESCO World Heritage site; its lightness and reversibility giving dignity to the solidity and timelessness of the standing stones 2.4 km away beyond the horizon.

Peter Wilson Affiliate RAIA, Jury Chair

Correcting the Record - Stone Erosion

Over at another place * we read: "They claim that since the big sarsens at Stonehenge have hed their edges rounded off since the Neolithic, then so have the bluestones -- and claim that this somehow demonstrates the inadequacy of the glacial transport theory. That argument is fundamentally flawed -- the sarsens have been exposed to weathering for millions of years, and the bluestones have not."

This is just silly, there is documented proof that the stones at ground level have suffered from the depredations of visitors, vandals and even livestock in the last 400 years, and presumably for the 4000 years before then. It is not the natural shapes of the various stones but the crisp edges from quarrying or shaping that have been rounded that are being noted.

William Stukeley in 1740 published his detailed account of Stonehenge which included an engraving of Stone 55 showing the tenon still in place. The lintel on the trilithon is still crisp edged as it had not yet fallen.

A recent picture taken from Google Streetview shows that Stone 55 has lost its tenon, all the stones are more rounded and the lintel, back above visitor reach has suffered from two hundred years at ground level.

(Click any picture for larger versions)

It is also another silly rant in that no one has suggested that some of the bluestones may be naturally rounded boulders that were brought from wales, it is just a strawman argument he is constructing.